The teen entrepreneur "alienat[ed] everyone he knew in the technology business, including potential investors" during his victorious tour around the U.S. earlier this year, the New Yorker's Julia Ioffe writes. "I told a lot of people exactly what I thought of them right to their face," Ternovskiy told her. He doesn't regret it, claiming Chatroulette is fine: The site's ratio of dick flashers is down to one in two hundred and he's getting referral fees from Hustler.com, where he sends the wang wavers.

Russia's Digital Sky Technologies might be the toast of Silicon Valley, but the investment…
Read more Read more

The traffic numbers don't support Ternovskiy's rosy spin on things, however; he concedes his own traffic figures—as calculated by Google Analytics—show it at one quarter of what it once was. If the Chatroulette founder figures out how to keep doubling revenue while quartering his supply of raw material, the son of two mathematicians will have discovered something far more fundamental and exciting than how to run a successful social network.

Advertisement

[Photo of Ternovskiy accepting a Webby Award this past June via WebbyAwards.com]